The Political Animal: An Anatomyby Jeremy Paxman352pp, Michael Joseph, £20

"Now, Mr Paxman, why on the very first page of this book do you say that Lord Archer has been chairman of the Conservative Party, when he never was any such thing?"

"Well - "

"Stop trying to dodge the question. And, while I'm at it, here's another: why do you label Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, 'an audibly pukka Englishman', when he is as Welsh as Welsh can be, born in Cardiff?"

"You see - "

"Stop wriggling, Mr Paxman. How about your weird statement that 'Jim Prior was driving his tractor through Norfolk and was asked why he didn't stand for Lowestoft'? Why was Prior engaged on this odd safari, rather like Alvin, the hero in David Lynch's film The Straight Story? And why, when in Norfolk, was he invited to stand for a Suffolk constituency?"

"If you'll only let me - "

"I'll let you, Mr Paxman. I'll let you clarify why you get wrong the reason for Barbara Castle's nomination as Labour's 1945 election candidate for Blackburn; the wording used by the Speaker when he calls a division; the occasions when the Commons police in the central lobby remove their helmets; use of the visitor's green cards; rights to rail travel for MPs and their spouses and children; the dates of election to the House of Commons of Michael Howard and Denis Healey (out by 13 years and seven years respectively); the quote from Hugh Gaitskell's famous speech on unilateralism; the occasions when MPs use the phraseology "hon and learned" (not referring to all lawyers, as you say, but just QCs); the outfit worn by the serjeant at arms (not, as you aver, "white tie and tails"); how select committee reports are compiled; the reason for Harold Wilson's resignation from Attlee's cabinet; the words spoken by Attlee when he sacked not, as you state, a Scotland secretary but a junior minister at the Dominions Office; referring to Reginald Bevins, as postmaster-general, a member of the cabinet when he was not."

"Actually - "

"It's no good, Mr Paxman. You may well go on insisting, in your discourteous interruptions of what I am attempting to say, that most of these errors are trivial and, slovenly as they undoubtedly are, ought not to be held against you. But you use this and much other material to illustrate why many, if not most, MPs are useless ("I do not believe they are all scoundrels", you concede; big deal) and why you are entitled to spend 300-odd (sometimes very odd) pages ridiculing politicians and demonstrating why your views and means of livelihood are so superior to theirs."

That this book amounts to a prolonged series of sneers is a pity since, interspersed with those sneers, are judgments that are sensible and shrewd, and deserve to be taken seriously (and I am not referring simply to Paxman's generous - and, alas, unrequited - description of my own book How to Be a Minister as "the best guide to being a minister").

The extremely low turn-outs, in both parliamentary and local elections, in the most deprived and needy areas of my constituency confirm Paxman's disturbing accuracy in stating that "those who are most dependent on the state seem to have the least engagement with it". This state of affairs highlights a serious failure, to date at any rate, of this Labour government.

He is accurate about the lack of structure in an MP's job: "What that means, they must discover or make up as they go along." The lack of a job description - maybe the lack of the possibility of a job description - is the reason why so many members of the Commons are engaged in such futile activities, fairly castigated by Paxman, such as flooding the order paper with often idiotic early day motions and assailing the local press with daft press releases (sometimes relating to events that have not in fact taken place - including, in the case of the Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge, the boast of a visit to a hospice that had not yet been built).

Paxman has it absolutely right when he says, of ministers and former ministers who have not been successful in their government jobs, that "some of these politicians are simply using the civil service as an excuse for their own failure". It may be no accident that he comes to this sage conclusion after devoting a couple of pages to the ministerial activities (or antics, or posturing) of Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

He is perceptive, too, in believing that in this post-ideological age many ministers have become mere managers of their departments, judged not on their ideals but on their efficiency; and that, because policy is too abstruse or too technical to engage the attention of journalists, many of them have become mere scavengers of gossip.

Paxman accurately accuses some MPs of making speeches consisting of cheap, point-scoring jibes. Yet if he gets this perception right, in some cases at any rate, what is the reader to make of the cheap, point-scoring jibes with which its author litters this book?

He is, moreover, pretty selective about whom he has decided to score points off. In his concluding acknowledgements, he makes a point of referring to the failure by the present Speaker of the Commons and by Denzil Davies MP to reply to letters from him; the implication being that not instantly to respond to correspondence from the great Paxman is an act of lese majesty. Predictably, he proceeds to insult both the Speaker and Davies.

He swallows whole Paul Marsden's inevitably self-interested version of how he came to defect from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, yet joins the pack in writing less admiringly of Shaun Woodward's switch from the Conservatives to Labour. He omits to contrast Marsden's defection very soon after being re-elected to the House of Commons as a Labour candidate with Woodward giving up a seat he could have held for life as a Tory without any guarantee that he would get another.

Paxman says of one politician that "his whole life has been an act"; but how else, except as an act, can Paxman's performances on Newsnight be described? He writes of MPs as "men and women overwhelmed by a sense of their own importance"; but can anyone have a greater sense of his own importance than a television presenter, elected by no one, who harangues and upbraids elected politicians and gets paid far more than they for doing so?

He quotes a shrewd statement by John Freeman, a former Labour minister and MP, that "they [politicians] all have a beetle gnawing at their insides". He tellingly describes MPs' constant round of activity, in some cases futile as well as exhausting, as "life on a hamster's wheel". Yet these hamsters have volunteered for their wheel. Those who seek to enter the House of Commons and to go through the gruelling ordeals that accompany becoming a parliamentary candidate - never mind getting elected - are driven by an obsession.

Betty Boothroyd, who spent nearly two decades attempting to reach the Commons before she finally got there, told Paxman: "It's in the blood, like coal-dust under the fingernails in mining families." Yet when Paxman goes on to say that politicians are "different from us", which "us" does he have in mind? Licence-paying citizens who go to a nine-to-five job every day, or television interviewers with the strange occupation of spending their late weekday evenings insulting other people and preening themselves for their boldness in doing so?

Describing a characteristic day in the House of Commons, Paxman complains that "the noise level is worthy of the worst-behaved primary school". From time to time it is indeed like that. Some scenes in the Commons are indeed disorderly, juvenile, even contemptible. Politicians, all of them fallible, can be exhibitionists and show-offs. Paxman claims, perhaps with some justice, that "politics can become no more than a playground for shallow people". Yet politicians are not the only personages on public display who can regard their chosen métier as a playground, and there is nothing quite so shallow as a TV screen.

On Newsnight a couple of weeks ago, I watched a woman colleague of Paxman's, at a delicate time in the firefighters' dispute, on screen with Nick Raynsford, the minister assigned to deal with the issue, and Andy Gilchrist of the Fire Brigades Union. When either of them tried to articulate a sentence, she interrupted, sometimes in mid-syllable, and prevented them from continuing. If she had been a primary school pupil, and use of the ruler were still permitted, her teacher would have rapped her across the knuckles.

God knows, politicians are imperfect. But Paxman may not be the best-placed person to tell them so.